Obsidian studio design director Josh Sawyer has made, if you don’t mind my saying so, some pretty cool videogames. New Vegas is a classic, the Pillars of Eternity games are some of my favourites ever, and Pentiment is a beautiful story about history and failure that also includes the line “A whole lot of inconceivable shit happens on this hell of an Earth.” Which is true.
With all those under his belt, what’s he got his eye on next? Well, the answer has less to do with the content of the game than with the people he makes it with. “I don’t even know anymore,” said Sawyer, when asked what his dream project is on a recent episode of the Human Can Opener Podcast.
“I got to make the games that I wanted to, that I really wanted to make. I wanted to make a D&D game—which I got to make immediately. I wanted to make a Fallout game, which took me another 10-ish years. And then I wanted to make a historical game, and I just got to do that.”
So, no worlds left to conquer? Maybe a little, but it’s more that the ideas Sawyer has are “not big. I feel like so much now is about working with the people that I like to work with. This is the thing: working even on a game that you’re not that jazzed about, if you love the people that you work with, can be awesome.” Conversely, “working on a dream game in an environment that sucks—it’s never going to be fun. Your dreams are gonna be nightmares.”
It means Sawyer says he doesn’t “carry around this idea of like here’s the one game” that he wants to make. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing left that he’d like to try his hand at. “I do still think it would be cool to make some sort of spiritual successor to Darklands—it’s a historical fantasy roleplaying game from the early ’90s… I don’t know if there’s any market for it at all, but yeah, if someone just wanted to throw money at me to burn, I’d probably try to make something like that.”
Speaking personally, I would devour a Sawyer take on Darklands, which is set in 15th-century Germany and has a big emphasis on (a version of) realism, like a kind of proto-Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Sawyer actually discussed it pretty recently himself, as an inspiration on how he thinks about armour design. I’d be very eager to see what his approach to a full Darklands(-esque) game would be.
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